A variety of types of filling machines are used throughout the food and beverage industries to fill containers with beverages and liquid food products. Many large productions utilize filling machines that are designed to fill a specific container type, which has a specific container dimension and fluid volume. These machines are commonly expensive and only used by large-scale productions. Small productions, such as micro-breweries, are often unable to afford these large-scale machines due to their high cost and the large-scale production of goods that makes them economically viable. As a result, small productions must resort to having their products packaged off-site by third party companies, or utilize packages or containers which are different from what the production company desires.
Moreover, even if large-scale filling machines were affordable, they are generally unable to be easily adapted to be used successful with the diversity of containers that are used by small-scale productions. This diversity of containers may range from 1 liter glass wine bottles, to 12 ounce beer bottles, to 12 ounce aluminum beer cans, to large growlers, and all containers in between. For example, in order to fill both 12 ounce beer bottles and 64 ounce growlers, a micro-brewery would need to either purchase two different filling machines or spend significant time changing parts out of the filling machine to properly adapt it for use with the different containers.
In addition to these above-noted shortcomings in the industry, there are a number of other drawbacks that come with using conventional filling machines to which the subject disclosure provides substantial improvements over.
Thus, a heretofore unaddressed need exists in the industry to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.